


Freedom

by Dain



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Airbending tattoos, Gen, Season Finale, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-26
Updated: 2014-08-26
Packaged: 2018-02-14 20:29:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2202018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dain/pseuds/Dain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[Spoilers for the Book 3 finale]</p><p>Jinora gets her tattoos.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Freedom

**Author's Note:**

> I intentionally kept this short, since I haven’t actually seen the finale of Book 3 (or most of the season, to be honest), but I’m so excited about Jinora getting her tattoos that I had to put something out there!

Sometimes, during the period when the pain had worn away but the novelty had not, she’d forget.

It wouldn’t be for long; she’d touch her head, or she’d simply feel how light and free her head felt without any hair. Before getting the tattoos, she’d thought that the shaving was simply a way of making the blue arrows and lines stand out, or feeling the air currents, but now she knew that the strangeness of a bald scalp was tied to airbending in and of itself – the weight was taken off and she felt freer than she ever had.

But still, she would forget, and the realization that she was a master, a real master of airbending, the first since her father, would fill her with an overwhelming burst of joy. Trepidation snuck in here and there, but in general, she wore her confidence like armor. Her elation was untouchable.

Over the next few years, Jinora would go through a cycle of growing her hair out and then shaving it again. It became a bit of a joke that one never knew what her hair would look like in the morning, as she began to experiment with different amounts of hair: shaving the sides, cropping the back short but letting hair fall down to frame her face, and often shaving the front of her scalp in order to show off the blue arrow on her forehead, a common hairstyle in the first Air Nation. But she always, in the end, went back to bare, smooth skin, chasing the days of freedom and light that it brought along.

Eventually, the blue lines snaking around her limbs and torso would become commonplace, and no longer send a thrill running up her spine whenever she saw them in a mirror or window, but the feeling of the razor sliding along her scalp and of locks of hair falling down her cheek never ceased to amaze her.


End file.
